Working with Gmail Contact Groups

Since the 2006 release of Google Gmail: Visual QuickStart Guide, new features have been added to the popular browser-based email client. In this addendum to the book, author Steve Schwartz explains how to create, use, and manage contact groups.

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From the author of

Like most current email clients, Gmail now supports groups (also called contact groups). If you regularly send email to a particular set of people, you can save time by defining those contacts as a group. Then, each time you want to send email to that set of people, you can address the message to the group, rather than laboriously specifying the individual addresses.

A group is most useful when its membership is relatively staticor, at least, the membership doesn't change dramatically from one mailing to the next. Following are some examples of possible groups:

Employees of a department

Department heads or supervisors

Board members

Members of a study group

Bowling team or league members

TIP

When you address email to a group, it goes to every member of the group. If your mailings are frequently intended for somebut not allgroup members, it may be safer (and potentially less embarrassing or disastrous) to address such messages manually, rather than using a group.

Creating Groups

To help you get started, Gmail provides three predefined groups: Friends, Family, and Coworkers. If you find these groups useful, you can add contacts to them. And if you need other special-purpose groups, you can define your own.

There are two ways to create a group:

Name a new, empty group and then add contacts to it later.

Define a new group based on selected contacts (similar to creating an iTunes playlist from selected songs). This approach allows you to create and populate the group with the appropriate members simultaneously.

To create a new, empty group, follow these steps:

Click the Contacts link on the left side of the Gmail window.

Click the New Group toolbar icon (see Figure 1) at the top of the Contact Manager.